Meet Me On the Equinox
by The Scarlett Ribbon
Summary: 0.3 - There is a part of Lindsey, still stuck in that moment when she realised Susie was never coming home, which doesn't want this haunting to end.
1. 01

When Jack died, it was the way a man of his experience deserved to go; softly and in his sleep. In the bed he shared with Abigail, the sheets rose and fell in synchronisation with his slow, steady breathing. And then, like a key turning in a lock, something inside him had come undone and he'd woken to find himself rising out of his body, like spiralling steam. In the moment before he was pulled, up and onwards, he looked down at his own face, worn and lined with age but peaceful. He looked at Abigail sleeping blissfully on beside his body and tried to reach out- to touch her one last time.

"Abigail," he murmured, trying to say goodbye, to wake her, to give her some warning of what she would find in the morning but his voice made no sound. His fingertips ghosted across her sleeping face and he caught the shiver that shook her, even in sleep. And then he was rising. Or falling. He supposed it depended on the viewpoint- as he was pulled from Earth. The stars seemed to get bigger, to shoot down around his head in a crown, in a blur. He saw lights around him, golden like fireflies, thousands of spirits like him, soaring for the heavens in the night sky.

His thoughts went out to Abigail, to Lindsey, to Buckley and Abigail Suzanne- the faces of his immediate family, the loved ones he was leaving behind on Earth. He was concerned with how they would cope with his loss, but over the years his family had become a stone pillar, a rock and underneath the grief they would accept the way things were. It was his time to go, he mused, he'd lived a long life. And they would have a body to say goodbye to, no questions left unanswered.

It wouldn't't be like before….

It seemed to him, as he entered a myriad of blurring images- houses, streets, all empty but familiar- that he still existed. He was dying, dead but he was still Jack, still Mr Salmon, father of Lindsey and Buckley, husband to Abigail. And his thoughts turned traitorously down a path he knew his heart may not be able to survive if it was disappointed.

And then he stopped. It took a moment for him to gather his bearings.

Jack was in a place he recognised. Stalks of corn were broken beneath his feet, the smell of moist earth rising to meet him. The sky was pearly with early morning mist, the kind that hovered above the ground in those moments before the sun completely rises. The sky was lightly flushed.

He wanted to cry out at the injustice of it all, but he couldn't draw breath. It seemed to him that an unnatural silence blanketed the cornfield that had haunted him for years and he waited, motionless, for it to break.

He couldn't have said what it was. Later, he would have said he was waiting, that he'd always been waiting though he hadn't known it. But as the sun slowly separated from the Earth, sending faint beams of light through the mist, he turned as though someone had called his name.

Jack could see someone in the mist, far away on the other side of the cornfield. They approached slowly, another shape loping towards him at a greater speed that alarmed him. He would have taken a step back, but his feet were rooted in place. It was a dog, he realized a moment later and it barked joyfully at him, tail wagging as it sniffed him and licked his face, achingly familiar.

"Holiday?" He sounded incredulous even to his own ears, but it was. Holiday barked and circled his legs, before bounding back towards the other figure, closer now, but still too far away to make out the face.

Jack watched the unknown person approach him. And the more he watched, the more he recognised the way they walked, the tilt of the head- it was a slow realization, a whisper of a memory stirring from where it had slept, lying dormant for twenty long years. It was a girl he realized absently. Quite young- the hips still undeveloped, chest flat, mousy hair parted down the middle. Something inside him stuttered then, tensing, an old fault line preparing to crack open. An idea rose to the front of his mind, to the edge of his lips but he couldn't think it, couldn't form the idea into the name that meant everything.

(And the girl was so close now. He could reach out and touch her but he was afraid-)

"Dad!" And Susie, his Susie, first born, beloved, dead dead dead closed the gap, her feet flying over the corn field as she flung her arms around him.

"Susie," Jack was crying. He hugged her tight, breathing her in through sobs that wracked his body. She was here. Really here, in his arms, absent for so long. Stolen from them twenty years ago.

"Susie," he repeated, just to say her name aloud and have it mean something again. "Susie."

"I'm here," She said and he realized that her voice had not changed. Just as her appearance had not changed. She was still his little girl, wearing the clothes he'd last seen her in, on that last morning before she left the house and never came back.

Jack pulled back, keeping her small left hand clasped in his own. He looked into her blue eyes. "I've missed you so much," he said, almost waiting for her to disappear. Susie smiled and it was breathtaking. He remembered how he described it to Len Fennerman, all those years ago; like stars exploding.

"I know," she said, "I was always watching you- all of you, for years."

And it occurred to him, that his daughter, his Susie, had never really left them. He'd thought her lost, frozen, gone, but she'd been right there, always.

He looked past her face, for just a moment, to look at the cornfield. Susie followed his glance and she answered his unspoken question.

"It was there," she pointed at a spot some twenty yards away and as she did so, the ground seemed to shift beneath them roiling and churning until he could see a trap door of flat frozen wood among the bristled corn stalks, slithers of light peeking through the cracks. The air was colder, darker. Around them, snow started to fall. Jack clutched Susie closer to him, as though he could ward off the fate of a child that had already happened, recognising that moment, that awful day materialising around them. He was suddenly very afraid.

"It's okay Dad." Susie said, petting Holiday with her free hand.

"No," he was sobbing, "it's not okay. It's _not _right. You weren't supposed to die honey- I failed you-"

"What happened to me," she told him solemnly, "could happen to anyone. It did. It took me a long time to realize I wasn't the only one."

The name _GeorgeHarvey _lingered unspoken in the air between them.

"I'm so sorry I couldn't protect you from him…"As he had failed to keep his child safe, so too had he failed to apprehend her murderer. Susie smiled and it was wistful, heartbreaking, her eyes locked on the trap door- the lip of her grave.

"I forgive you." Those three words, light as air set him free. They were, he realized, the words he had needed to hear for a very long time. Peace started to spread throughout his body as though he'd sunk into a warm bath.

Susie looked up at him. "Come on," she said, "There's so much I have to show you."

Hand in hers, Jack walked with his daughter until the cornfield around them melted away into something new. He marvelled at the coloured blocks of Fairfax high school up ahead- their whole neighbourhood, but somehow, not- spread out around them. There were questions he had wanted to know the answers to- where was her body? what happened in those final minutes? had she been lonely in heaven all this time?- but they died in his throat. They were dead; they had all the time in the world. Susie was here and he would stay by her side forever, watching- waiting.

Death was the only certainty in life, Jack realized. And one day -far in the future he hoped- his family, all of them, would be together again. Jack. Abigail. Susie. Lindsey. Buckley.

The Salmons, all of them together the way they were supposed to be- the way they should have been- if it hadn't been for the ongoing horror of that one moment on December 6th, 1973.


	2. 02

It is 1993 and Clarissa- useless, washed out stoner- is stood somewhere she never wanted to be again. She is thirty four; the coloured blocks of Fairfax high remain unchanged.

It is early morning and the sun has not yet fully risen. It peeks over the horizon sleepily, casting a faint golden glow over the neighbourhood- the football field where she used to preen in front of the boys, the rows and rows of houses where she grew up. It illuminates the tips of the broken cornstalks up ahead.

She's still afraid of it, the cornfield. Despite fifteen years of the drugs and the booze and the sex, she still remembers with painful clarity every spine chilling whisper about that place following the 6th December, twenty years ago. Midnight. Devil worship. Ray Singh.

Even worse were the missing pieces, the blanks that were filled in with ever more grisly rumours and details her classmates chose that had made her want to scream until they went away.

_Hey, _she'd wanted to say, _that's my best friend you're talking about. _

But they'd all known that, hadn't they? They had known and they stared. As a girl Clarissa had loved attention, loved _being_ the centre of attention- but after that she found she didn't want the association. Brian had been a life saver.

In the beginning, anyway.

Clarissa shakes her head trying to dispel those particular memories, but its not easy to ignore. Her turbulent relationship with Brian Nelson was the foundation for the path her life would take for the next twenty years. The hardest part was knowing that Clarissa herself paved the way, brick by brick to where she was now. She could blame Brian for getting her into the drugs, or her mother for never loving her enough, or Su- her best friend- for getting killed and ruining everything, but the truth was Clarissa chose. In the end she always chose.

It is cold. She is wearing thin clothing, inadequate for the early morning chill. It doesn't seem to matter now; the cold makes her feel alive, more alive than she has in years. Its been so long since Clarissa has truly felt the sun.

"I'm here," she murmurs, her voice slurred after years of abusing her body. She sounds like a different person. In a lot of ways, she is. A long time ago it seems, she was the giggling light hearted girl that everyone wanted to be in high school, in middle school. But Clarissa knows now the weight of regret.

"I'm here," she repeats for her own benefit. Maybe for that other girl too, if she believed in heaven and those sorts of things. Maybe if she hadn't seen a lifetimes worth of sorrow that comes from a life wasted, she would think _maybe she knows I'm here. Just maybe she's listening. _

Susie Salmon. Clarissa forces herself to think the words she has avoided in every way humanely possible, for twenty years. _Susie. _

She shuts her eyes on the rising sun and its golden rays and tries to picture the face that goes with the name. All she can see is that last school photo that plastered the newspapers, the lampposts, the shop doors for months on end. At some point- Clarissa is not sure when it happened- it stopped being Susie and became the face of the missing girl, the murdered girl who no one ever found. She cannot remember the colour of Susie's eyes, the sound of her laugh. The smile however, she can perfectly recall; frozen, lifeless on a flat piece of paper.

She takes a step into the cornfield, her breath hanging on a thread. She is tentative, afraid. The memory of her last venture here is pressing vividly against the walls of her skull. She wants a drink.

Once, Clarissa- silly, lost Clarissa- came to the cornfield alone in the darkness. The corn was long and obstructed her view, crowding over her head like shadows looming over her. It crunches beneath her feet in broken stalks now but that doesn't stop the recollection.

Brian had wanted her. She had known that and it had both enthralled and repelled her in equal measure.

"_The cornfield," _she had told him, impressing him with what he thought was her daring nature, _"I'll meet you in the cornfield." _

She had let him think that she had chosen it for the extra thrill of knowing what had happened there. It wasn't. She had wanted the whispers to stop, the looks, the glances- all of it- to stop. But she had never wanted to spit on Susie's memory, on the horror that had befallen her.

Once, Clarissa had gone to the cornfield to meet a boy, the flashlight gripped tightly in her hand. She wanted to leave the old Clarissa- the girl who had been Susie's friend- behind. Sex with Brian had been the fastest way she knew how to achieve this. But she had also had the vague idea that it was something beautiful she could do. Clarissa had had the childish idea that she could purify the blood soaked ground of the cornfield by filling it with an act of love. That by making love under the stars she could undo all the wrong that it had absorbed.

It hadn't quite worked out like that, of course. She still felt the shame of what Brian did to Mr Salmon, who had been fond of her, of what he had done to a family that had to live with devastation every moment for the rest of their lives. She couldn't forget the way that man, so broken in the faint torchlight, had screamed his daughter's name.

"_Susie!" _A desperate cry. _"Susie!" _

Clarissa is still afraid of the cornfield and all the things it represents. But she is here. She has been in and out of rehab for five years. Its time to stop running away. She takes a deep breath and looks up at the baby blue sky, the pink streaks, the wispy looking clouds. It goes on forever. Looking at it, its not so hard to believe in the idea of heaven.

"Hey Susie," she whispers, finally _finally, _saying the name aloud. "Its been awhile, I know." There are so many things she wants to say. They crowd her brain and stick in her throat. _Imissedyoui'. _

"Its been awhile," she repeats. "But I've come back."


	3. 03

There is a ghost in her skin.

Lindsey sees it sometimes, in the sudden flash of her reflection in a shop window – her startled eyes and behind her, standing so close they could almost be one person, an outline of someone else.

The vision vanishes the moment she blinks, but the feeling doesn't disappear as easily; the suspicion that when she wraps her arms around Samuel, another pair of arms moves with hers. When she runs laps around the neighbourhood, a phantom pair of lungs rises and falls in time with her own harsh breathing.

* * *

"What are you looking at?" Samuel asks her sometimes, when he catches her looking over her shoulder on their way home from school. The words die in her throat and Lindsey just shakes her head, folding the cracks in on themselves so that no one will see they are really fissures without ends. Let them – everyone – think she has been made paranoid by her sister's death; the body that was never found and the murderer never satisfactorily apprehended. How could she possibly explain that since she broke into the green house, she's felt compelled to check that there was only one shadow following her on the pavement?

Something happened to her in that house, an explanation for which Lindsey will never be able to find words. It had felt like a dozen ghostly hands pressing in on her, as if something greater and more powerful than anything she had ever known had been pushing at her fragile human body, pushing until the very air in that house was impossible to breathe. She had felt crushed beneath something weightless and insubstantial, a pressure from which there had been no relief.

_Susie was with me in that house, _she thinks, knowing it is impossible and yet there is no arguing against it. When she kicked in the glass and crawled, feet forward, into Mr Harvey's basement, her dead sister had filled the air around her, always just out of reach. Even now, Lindsey is half-convinced that if she had just run a bit faster, she would have caught up to Susie's elusive and omnipotent ghost – would have seen her standing in the next room.

* * *

Then the drawing – the ghostly almost-whisper in her ear of _that is where I died._

* * *

Since then she's felt Susie's presence creeping up on her through the hollow places of her bones and the still air that touches her skin; a ghost hiding in the solid black lines of her shadow.

And there is a part of her, still stuck in that moment when she realised Susie was never coming home, which doesn't want this haunting to end.

* * *

**notes: sometimes I stumble across things I've left half-written and decide to half another go.**

**notes2: _the lovely bones _will always haunt me.**


End file.
